Sylvia Path's Daddy

After doing some research on the poet Sylvia Plath it soon became apparent that this poem “Daddy” is somewhat of a confessional life story. Throughout the poem Plath incorporates many different elements to reveal the theme of her negative attitude towards men in her life especially that of her father.


In lines 2-3 “Any more black shoe, In which I have lived like a foot.” Plath uses the image of feet and black shoes to begin to reveal the picture of her relationship with her father. The feet here represent that of herself, she in this case is the foot while her father is the shoe, a shoe which she is surrounded by and cant escape. The color black is used here to also represent another portion of the picture of the relationship she has with her father revealing that black is symbolic of death and that since the shoe that is binding her is black, in essence is killing her.


In lines 8-10 “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe, Bug as a Frisco seal.” Plath is portraying her father as a statue one made up of marble. Marble is cold and hard and when in the form of a statue, which is a replica of the person, which is life-less, again, an image of death. The statue is something that you can talk to but your words will never penetrate, she feels like she is talking to her father that way and that she will never get any kind of reaction out of him. There is a communication barrier that Plath illustrates using another symbol in lines 22-26 “So I could never tell where you put your foot, your root. I could never talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare.” These lines are relatively important in revealing another aspect of her relationship with her father, she is saying that there is no way that she was able to even utter a sound around him out of fear. Since Nazi’s are German and she is portraying herself as a Jew, the way she describes the German language is the way she feels towards her father. “And the...